The 欧美口爆视频-Boulder School of Education has received $80,000 to help new teachers use technology in their classrooms, especially teachers who will be working in low-income areas.
The U.S. Department of Education grant will be coupled with an additional $85,000 provided by the School of Education and the 欧美口爆视频-Boulder Alliance for Technology, Learning and Society program.
"We want to focus what our students do on what real classrooms need," said education Professor Michael Meloth, who is co-directing the Preparing Tomorrow's Teachers to Use Technology program with Professors Nick Peressini and Mitchell Nathan.
A unique feature of the School of Education teacher education program is that many students are required to work with technology in a school classroom or a community agency, Meloth said. Students try out different uses of technology in different types of educational settings and then report back on how they worked.
The funding was used to hire a technology coordinator for the School of Education, revise several teacher education courses and establish a software review center so that faculty and students can test and evaluate educational software, Meloth said. It also was used to purchase 10 laptop computers, a data projector and six devices called "Alphasmarts" that can be used to determine how well students are learning a lesson, among other functions.
"With all this new technology, it takes some thinking about how to use it in a meaningful way," Meloth said. "Our goal is to model for our students how and when technology is best used in classrooms.
A major focus of the program will be on future teachers who are interested in working with low-income, high-need children.
"These are the children at greatest risk of missing out as technology becomes more and more important," Meloth said. "Wherever possible, we want to link our work with this technology to our work with low-income children to help them prepare for where the jobs are."
To further its efforts in preparing new teachers to use technology, the School of Education is continuing to look for additional external funding.
It also will capitalize on several existing campus resources, including the Anderson Language Technology Center, the Integrated Teaching and Learning Laboratory, the computer science department, the Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences, the Hughes Initiative and others.